Alito and the Elephant In The Family Room

As I was driving in to work today, I listened to NPR's coverage of the Alito nomination. As always, I don't have a digital recorder in my car (note to self...) so I'll have to paraphrase. However, I think the following paraphrase is conceptually accurate as can be:

President Bush bla bla Samuel Alito bla bla bla abortion bla bla bla abortion abortion abortion abortion bla bla bla bla spousal notification bla chilling effect bla bla abuse of women bla bla bla abortion abortion abortion abortion bla bla bla.

It would seem that Alito's views on spousal notification - the imperative to notify a husband if a wife is getting an abortion - is going to be a major contention in this nomination.

Good.

Glenn Reynolds sounds off on the topic.

Says Reynolds:

I'm not sure about Pennsylvania, but in many states her spouse -- even if he's not the father of the child -- would still be on the hook for child support. Likewise, if he didn't want children, but she disagreed, lied to him about birth control, and got pregnant. And he certainly couldn't force her to have an abortion if she did so, even if his desire not to have children was powerful, and explicitly expressed at the outset. (The usual response -- "he made his choice when he had sex without a condom" -- never comes up in discussions of women and abortion.)

While I'm softer on abortion than a lot of conservatives - I am personally pro-life, and have actually become more militant about it over the years, but I think it should be a state decision, not a matter of federal judicial fiat - there are three issues that, to me, beg further discussion, both in society and at the SCOTUS:

1. One person's "right" can not infringe on another person's "right". Yet the "right" to "a woman's choice" infringes, in many cases, on father's choices; the choice on becoming a parent commensurate with a woman's choice (a choice that legally obligates the father to 18 years of servitude) or, by the same token, the choice to keep the child (for whose support he'd otherwise be legally obliged, were the child not aborted).
2. The ethics of the whole thing. While I find abortion abhorrent in almost every way (while seeing the occasional, rare medical justification for it), it'd go a long way if the pro-"choice" crowd were to drop the conceit that they're just excising a piece of tissue - a lump of plasm that, outside the mother, can be viable before six months' gestation, but if it's not born yet, magically remains a...just tissue? If they were to just say "there are two ethical sides to this", admitting that there are rational reasons for a reasonable person to push back at their logic, it'd go a long way. But of course, it's not a long way that the NOW and NARAL want anyone to go.
3. Oh, and then that whole pesky there's nothing in the Constitution about privacy or penumbras that would make either a federal issue bit...

Glenn continues:

So where's the husband's procreational autonomy? Did he give it up by getting married? And, if he did, is it unthinkable that when they get married women might give some of their autonomy up, too?

The problem here is that you can say "my body, my choice" -- but when you say, "my body, my choice but our responsibility," well, it loses some of its punch.

Bingo.

Before I post this, let me head off the inevitable first response, that childbirth is a rigorous, dangerous process for women. It is indeed; but in the great scheme of human procreation, it's only the beginning. Following the nine months of pregnancy and few hours or days of delivery are a lifetime of effort, pain, joy and expense that lead a child from being a life support system for a pair of lungs and digestive tract, to a fully formed, well-adjusted human being. These activities are fundamentally unisex - or at least they need to be, as studies and research and, not incidentally, a couple of million years of human experience have shown.

If the Alito nomination exposes the elephant in the family room, so much the better.

Posted by Mitch at October 31, 2005 12:12 PM | TrackBack